Technical Field
The present disclosure generally relates to the charging and energy release from rechargeable electrical energy storage devices (e.g., secondary batteries, supercapacitors or ultracapacitors), which may be suitable for use in a variety of fields or applications, for instance transportation and non-transportation uses.
Description of the Related Art
There are a wide variety of uses or applications for electrical energy storage devices. One such application is in the field of transportation. However, after rechargeable electrical energy storage devices used in transportation applications no longer have the required capacity to continue to be used in such transportation applications, other uses of these electrical energy storage devices may need to be found in order to utilize the remaining capacity. Thus a need exists to utilize these aged electrical energy storage devices efficiently and in a more cost-effective manner.
Additionally, increasing numbers of rechargeable lithium-ion (Li-ion) batteries are starting to be used in new electric vehicles. However, since lithium-ion battery-powered cars are relatively recently coming to the mass market, the recycling centers that can reclaim their components are still in their infancy too. Also, Recycled lithium is as much as five times the cost of lithium produced from the least costly brine based process. In particular, with lithium recycling in its infancy, there is currently no main recycling infrastructure in the world that treats only automotive Li-ion batteries. Therefore, given the current limit to the extent of battery-recycling infrastructure for these types of recycling centers and the fact that lithium-based batteries are less valuable to recycle than earlier types of batteries, there is also a current need, especially with respect to lithium-ion batteries, to find more ways to utilize the remaining capacity for these types of batteries before incurring the cost and going through the effort of recycling them.